Five: Mind Your Surroundings

Over the last several months, maybe the whole year, I've made mention of the fact that, years and years ago, mainly when I was a moody teen with many observations, my blog entries were far more numerous. Nowadays I am a busy, often-exhausted twenty-something (resisting adulthood with every fiber.) It's not that I have fewer observations, but I have changed my criteria as to what is blogworthy, to the point that very little is. Not to mention, since starting at U of T, the cast of characters in my life has grown unwieldy. My life is littered with minor characters who don't get very fulfilling storyarcs.

We've been over this, my life is a TV show.

In that sense, my life is kind of a bummer, but that's not news, and there will always be something (or a lot of somethings) about my life that is a bit of a bringdown. I've been thinking lately how I mainly blog when something interesting has happened... or I am bored. Whichever the case, I tend to focus about what made each day unique, what specifically about the day caused me to think about blogging, or at any rate I am likely to think about when blogging. And I'll get to that momentarily, but I was thinking about altering that at least once. The shame of that tendency is that the routines, the little moments, get obscured, and I forget them. It's like how the other day I recounted all the stuff around the house that was busted, much of which is now fixed (the toilet handle is still in rough shape but the faucet and side door handle will hold for now.) That stuff had been on my mind for weeks and there was never an occasion to mention it.

This particularly occurs to me early in the morning, when blogging is the furthest from my mind. I've never mentioned this, and I'm likely to forget sometime down the road, but I am awakened every morning at like 6. It's the havoc of having a boarder that I took for granted between John and Erica -- actually, John wasn't even so bad, but when someone lives with you, you accept their need to keep certain hours, and my misfortune is that my wall is common with the kitchen. Every morning, more or less without fail, between my mom's routine looking after the dog, and whatever Erica is up to, I am awakened fairly promptly, usually after going to bed around 2, because I am a glutton for punishment.

And then I roll over when the noise dies down and try to get another 2 1/2 or 3 hours of sleep. Usually it's not so hard, but damn is it exhausting when I actually do get up. See, this is the little things I forget, because they are fairly utterly inconsequential, little thoughts likely to evaporate as soon as I think them, like the micro black holes the LHC is supposed to have conjured up, destroyed by their own Hawking energy or something sciencey-sounding.

When I do get up, and the house is more or less vacant because Mom and Erica have usually gone off on their way but B. isn't up yet. So I leave my room and it causes poor little skeletal Max to raise his head from his mid-morning nap. Poor guy, I can't really hve friends over from how shabby he looks now, because over a year ago when I had Robyn over she said he looked in rough shape, and that was before he really started to go downhill. Speaking of dead pets, apparently you can see Rocky in front of my house on Google street view. So he's immortalized on the internet. For now. And by that, I mean in a place other than Brando's Facebook.

The rest of the mornings aren't particularly worth mentioning, I seem to have found the exact rhythm of sleeping past alarm/shower/eat cereal/make lunch/websurf/leave for the train. The weather is nice enough that I can still walk right down there, I'm not even sure I'll ever feel differently, except next semester when I've got Pop Music in the morning at 10. Well, that's a labor of love. At least that isn't the case 3 days a week like last year, as far as I can tell. In fact, apart from that one blip, next semester looks like a better schedule, with fewer evening classes. That's good, because I'm getting a little weary of eating roast beef sandwiches in class. Which is something that is within my capacity to change anyway, because hell, I used to eat BLTs in AmLit last year anyway. It's complicated, and by complicated, I mean pointless. This is SWP after all.

So the interesting thing about today I suppose, part one, was that I had my Drama midterm. It was particularly shocking to me to find that we are now in the middle of the term because in my mind we are still in that "Just finding my footing, getting into the routine" stage. But I guess I'm just too used to yearlong classes. So this midterm, for which I was not at all prepared before the weekend. I did manage to catch up on plenty of reading, although not enough. I should've gotten some Chekhov in there, and I really fucked up at least two identification questions, one of which I utterly did not do, forfeiting me 10%. I suck. Although I think I did fairly well on the essay, because I was able to speak fairly eloquently about three of the four plays I read/examined. Ghost Sonata was fairly elusive. And every line of Earnest rang out to me in the voices of my friends in 2004, even the lines that were cut from the play.

Then I kicked around Pratt for like 3 hours, followed by Theory. Again I was actively trying to involve myself with the lesson, because the material is actually not incomprehensible, or even necessarily as dry as I feared, it's just that the class takes a very long time to resolve itself, because on a Wednesday night between 6 and 9, time takes about twice as long its normal rate.

But I was particularly looking forward to the end of class because Vasa invited me over to watch Glee with her friends. I enjoy the show -- I think it's got a bit too much hype on it, but it really is an impressive piece of TV entertainment. I got there a few minutes into the episode, and mainly sat there for the hour, occasionally commenting while we all watched and while all the various friends of Vasa went over their friend-business. I understand, I've been the stranger before.

It was a nice night, I'll do it again, and now I'm at home and tired. I've got some reading to do this weekend, that's for sure.

Last night, a female acquaintance of mine made a very interesting request. She sends me a Facebook message at like 1 AM (she doesn't have me on MSN, I neglected to add her when I changed my username because we didn't talk often) asking if I'm still awake. When I confirm this, she asks that I tell her a story, I guess because she had a rough day and needed something to ease her mind before going to sleep. Flattered to have been asked, I started typing a little nonsense, and hopefully she liked it.

It was actually a nice little moment between me and this girl; like I said, I was flattered she asked me, and hope she does so again, although that means I'll have to have something ready. Or not, since what I wrote her I came up with on the spot (although previous on-the-spot story attempts are sometimes met with failure.) It was a fun activity.

Well, it certainly put me in a good mood before bet, and led to some very unusual dreams (not involving this girl, at least directly. Ask Freud, who the hell knows what it was really about.) A dream, I might add, from which I was awakened at 6:00 AM. just to bring this whole fucker full-circle.

I've been listening to a lot of Me First and the Gimme Gimmes lately. I get really energized by their takes on familiar songs. I have acquired probably more tracks than I should by not-entirely-kosher means. The less said the better.

Keep on rockin'
-Scotto